Category: News

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Initial Idea:

In 2016, I had the idea of creating a video game based on courtroom dramas that I enjoyed watching at the time. My favorite legal drama at the time was Boston Legal, which included witty repartee, court drama and pressing moral and ethical decisions. I was heavily inspired by this combination of comedy and serious drama and wanted to recreate this in a game.

Inspired by the genre and my own history learning law, I started developing the concept further into a narrative. The most popular legal narrative is that of the murder case with multiple suspects. Crime fiction (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler) is full of these types of scenarios, where a group of characters turn up to an isolated [‘closed circle’] environment, only for one of them to be murdered during the course of the night. Famous scenarios include islands where no one can leave or train carriages, as in the case of the recent blockbuster film, Murder on the Orient Express.

With a murder case as the narrative and a script already underway, I began considering various gameplay ideas, mechanics and limitations. 

I had not yet played the most famous other game in this genre: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. But I knew vaguely that that game involved extensive dialogue, with a hunt for clues and various components to solve a case. I later learnt that Phoenix Wright relied heavily on witness cross-examination, where witnesses would be confronted with evidence contrary to that which they had stated. This created a level of drama and intrigue similar to the TV dramas I enjoyed.

Deciding on Format – 2D vs. 3D:

Despite a long history in 3D art, I decided to make a 2D game. This was my first, and biggest, mistake. My latest game, “The Cinema Rosa” is based in 3D and has been a much easier experience in development than Twelve Absent Men. I believe it is okay to select a format you are unfamiliar with, so long as you are ready to commit the time necessary to learn new skills. If choosing to design in 2D, for instance, a rudimentary understanding of drawing and animation would greatly assist in the design process. These were skills I lacked and so I was heavily reliant on others during the early stages of the project.

My second mistake was to rely on others for the most crucial aspect of development: coding. I believe now that the primary developer (or the main people on a team) should be programmers, rather than artists. This is mostly to avoid a situation that happened to me where a programmer can become too busy to work on the project, or a new programmer cannot keep up with what has already been done on the project before. I believe that the initial starting team on a project should have the sufficient skills to complete at least a very basic version of the project, without having to rely solely on outsourcing or other paid assistance. Outsourcing, in my experience, works far better for art than for coding. 

My final mistake with picking 2D instead of 3D is that the most famous game in the genre, Ace Attorney, was a 2D game. It is important when competing with major titles to have a significant level of difference between what you are making and what already exists. This helps both with press (you can advertise your point of difference as a major reason to be featured), and it also helps in terms of motivation (your point of difference can be a rallying cry for your team). It also is a great way to get customers interested in something new and different, which are the main buzzwords in gaming these days.

The Mistake of Not Picking 3D:

In the early stages of development, I created a test environment in 3D. This environment was highly successful in terms of market appeal. I quickly landed an article about the development of the environment (https://80.lv/articles/josh-krook-courtroom-breakdown/), and got various comments praising the look of the courtroom.

It’s important in game design to play to your strengths. My strength in 3D art was a major asset to the project, which was completely irrelevant when designing a 2D game. Had my strength been relied on more, I could have used my 3D environments to promote the game further, get better press and spread the word. As it was, I had to rely on the art of 2D artists, with minimal supervision. While I enjoyed what they created, many players critiqued the art style and by the time the game was done and ready to go, there was no time or ability to change the art to suit player demand.

Backstory and Plot:

As a murder mystery game/case, the easiest place to start your plot is at the scene of the crime. The original idea was to have a Gatsby-inspired party scene, where the host has a set of eccentric guests over for a party, and by the end of the night, the host ends up dead.

This idea was developed further and further, with ideas on characters built into the scene over time.

The final version of this idea can be seen in the cinematic trailer:

[embedded content]

Characters and Design:

The art of a 2D court game begins and ends with character design. The most important thing to me was to have each character appear unique, so that the player could identify everyone on face alone.

A courtroom game in general will have several obvious characters. There will always be a judge, two lawyers and a set of witnesses. The bailiff in Twelve Absent Men was a nice addition, as someone who could keep the peace in the courtroom.

The idea was to give each character a unique silhouette and a unique color pallette. They would all, of course, have a motive for the murder. This motive generally related to their profession in some way (e.g. the banker had a money motive). It was important to tie in their motive to the design of the character, so that the game would play out in a fairly logical manner.

In terms of style, I wanted the characters to look like most modern American animations (chiefly, the design was inspired by Archer).

Here are some of the final images of characters:

Choices and Consequences:

Originally, the game was going to have various endings depending on the choices the player made. This did indeed come about, but the endings were far less meaningful and consequential than intended. I initially wanted some endings to be completely ridiculous (for instance, a witness getting up and walking out of the courtroom; a gunfight; a portal to another dimension opening). Instead, the endings were fairly standard. The lawyer would accuse someone of committing the crime, and if you got it right, you triggered a confession. If you got it wrong, the wrong person went to prison. 

This did feel meaningful, but there were other problems with this kind of ending. Namely, it relied on players remembering a lot about the evidence without having a chance to look it over thoroughly.

Finally, there was also a major bug in the Mac version that prevented players from reaching any ending – something which came down to a Software choice problem. The version of GameMaker I used is notoriously bad at running on iOS.

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In terms of smaller choices, at various points in the game the player would be allowed to trigger different dialogue options. Choosing different options led to different consequences. Sometimes, choosing the wrong dialogue option meant you missed out on crucial evidence. It was possible, though difficult, to choose the wrong dialogue option so many times that by the end of the game, you would not be able to win at all (missing all crucial evidence to convict).

Speed of the Game, Wit, Comedy:

Again, inspired by Boston Legal, I wanted the game to play out quite fast. I wanted snappy, witty dialogue and a lot of back and forth between the lawyers, the bailiff, the judge and the witnesses. My idea was to make the judge quite cranky, the lawyers antagonistic towards each other and the bailiff the peace keeper, constantly interrupting to try and keep things from getting out of hand. However, I also wanted things to get out of hand, and often. I wanted ridiculous dialogue options and crazy options to be the norm.

A lot of the speed and wit of the game can be seen in the final release trailer:

[embedded content]

Innocent until Proven Guilty:

The game begins with you, the lawyer protagonist, introduced to a defendant who has been charged with murder. The ultimate game of the goal, therefore, is to prove your client is not guilty. That said however, building on the choices and consequences theme, there is a possibility that you definitively prove your client guilty (by selecting certain evidence), there is also a possibility that you prove your client not-guilty but you don’t reveal the guilty party. Guilty and innocence is a very convenient way to end a game, and so there was not much work needed to teach the player what the goal of the game was. In a courtroom, the goal is almost intuitive, in part, because our culture is saturated with legal drama media. 

The Final Analysis:

Twelve Absent Men was a funny and interesting game that had a lot of potential. Several key problems in development however, caused a shaky and ultimately unsuccessful launch. These included: the choice of 2D over 3D, the lack of a consistent programmer and the choice of GameMaker as a software tool.

Aside from these difficulties, there were the difficulties faced by any indie game designer. Getting marketing out about a game is extremely difficult in an oversaturated marketplace. It is difficult to get the attention of gaming journalists (only 3 articles were written about Twelve Absent Men, 2 by the same person). It was basically impossible to get YouTube streamers interested in playing, despite months of work to do so. Finally, online critics are vicious when it comes to bugs in indie games, and they often expect the same quality level as a billion-dollar company, from a one-to-three person development team. These were ultimately the most difficult hurdles to overcome.

The 2018 Game Developer’s Conference will feature an exhibition called Alt.Ctrl.GDC dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions. Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase. You can find all of the interviews here.

Pump the Frog uses a bicycle air pump to inflate or deflate a frog, as well as manipulate objects in the environment through spinning, in order to help the amphibian find food and get around. 

Gamasutra spoke with 7 Holy Frogges, developers of Pump the Frog, about how they designed their froggy adventure around the capabilities of a bike pump, as well as how they turned the pump into a viable controller.

What’s your name, and what was your role on this project?

We are 7 Holy Frogges, a team of game developers currently studying Game Design at Uppsala University campus Gotland.

Karl Wallsten: Project Manager, Lead Tech

Felix Wahlström, Lead Artist

Erik Säll, Lead Programer

Erik Osana, Programer

Theo Unland Karlsson, Lead Design  

How do you describe your innovative controller to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with it?

Our controller is a re-purposed bicycle-pump! You use it as a lever to control the size of the frog, our main character, and objects and creatures in the environment. When the handle is pushed down, the frog gets pumped up with air, and when you drag it up again the air is sucked out – the frog becomes small! You can also spin the pump!

The pump is fitted with a mouse sensor that reads the pump shaft as it moves up and down and is twisted – this is translated into values that change the frog and other objects!

What’s your background in making games?

Wahlström: I never made any proper video-games until I started studying at Campus Gotland. However, I have been drawing all my life, and for around 5 years with the explicit goal to work with games at some point in my future. So far here on campus, I have been a part of two larger projects, both in groups including Erik (Säll), one of them was our first university project – a side-scrolling underwater-exploring game (Below the Abyss), and the other is Pump the Frog. Add a couple of game-jams to that and my short background in game-making is summarized.

Säll: I started making games in a visual scripting language called scratch (scratch.mit.edu) when I was 13 or so. I had a little game series called ninja roy which people seemed to go crazy over (lol). I also made some small unreleased XNA games. Since I started studying game design at Gotland, I’ve gotten to make some cool games together with people, which of course is a major difference in scope compared to working alone. I’d also like to actually release a game some time in the future.

Osana: I started making card games as a hobby during my early years, and later learned the Unreal blueprint scripting language. Since I started studying game design at Gotland Campus, I have learned both C# and C++, which gave me the tools and understanding of code structure and how to create games in a team. Throughout my time in the university i have been working on 5 different games and gained priceless practical experience in both game design and coding.

What development tools did you use to build Pump the Frog?

The game is made from scratch in Unity, except for the plug-in “Ferr2d”, which is used to loop textures on the terrain-objects. Textures and animations were made using Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint, respectively.

What physical materials did you use to make it?

Pump the Frog’s input is actually only made with two components, We bought an ordinary bicycle pump and a computer-mouse and then simply attached the mouse to the pump.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

The game  was made during an 8 week project at the end of spring 2017 at Uppsala University Campus Gotland, but we continued to work on it sporadically during the autumn of 2017 and are now getting the production going properly in 2018.  

How did you come up with the concept?

We had several brainstorm sessions and came up with many ideas and different inputs. One of the input ideas was to use a pump, and when thinking about what you can do with a pump, we came up with the idea of controlling a ball that is rolling down a hill with it. Someone then hatched the obvious idea of making the ball into an inflatable animal, the natural conclusion was, of course, to make the animal a frog. As the idea and aesthetics were pinpointed, more features were added, and here we are!

What challenges did you face in turning a pump into a controller?

Not that many; when we figured out that we can use a mouse sensor to read the pump shaft, construction was really straight forward. We had many ideas on how to read the data from a pump, including microphones and strings, but a mouse was the easiest way to solve the problem. The challenges we faced with the mouse was to make it read the x angle straight and make it stay there during days of pumping, since if the mouse moves – the laser cant read the pump shaft properly.

What thoughts went into designing gameplay interactions around what people can do with an air pump?

You use a pump to inflate things in real life, so we went with the same philosophy while designing the challenges. Also, since air is light, the game and challenges are often about floating. For instance, The Frog has two extremes on the inflate-deflate scale. One is when you are fully inflated, which makes you float on air streams and bounce around more. The other is when the frog is completely deflated, which makes him more dense and heavy.

How did you design challenges around what the pump allows players to do? How did its capabilities affect stages you made?

The pump only allows 4 different inputs: up, down, spin left and spin right. With this in mind, we had to adapt and design our challenges accordingly. At first, we only thought about using it for inflating and deflating, but we added things in the environment that turn on and of f or move around, and later on added challenges that involve spinning the pump.

The limitations of the pump as to the amount of control we could give the player made designing obstacles around that ,and still maintaining variation in gameplay, our biggest challenge.

What does having an air pump for a controller teach the player before they’ve even started to play Pump the Frog?

A pump tends to be used to fill things with air, so that the game involves pumping and that the game has something to do with air should be quite clear from the start. The player can also assume that the game will not be too complicated, since the input is so simple and easy to understand.

How do you think standard interfaces and controllers will change over the next five or ten years?

Wallsten:They will not change that much in 5 to ten years, I believe,.

Wahlström: In 20XX, AR bicycle pumps are default input methods for grand-strategy-games!

It’s that time again: with the 2018 Game Developers Conference just a month away, organizers are proud to announce that for the sixth year running, 30 GDC Indie Games Summit tickets will be donated to the 2018 Indie Giving initiative in partnership with the fantastic Indie Giving charity.

The goal of this enduring partnership with Indie Giving, which continues to be overseen by FGL chief and indie community veteran Chris Hughes, is to give back to people in need — and give indie game makers who are generous with their time an opportunity to attend GDC at an affordable rate.

GDC officials have reserved 30 of the sold-out Indie Games Summit passes for purchase through the Indie Giving package program. To purchase these $349 packages, you must agree to give back to the local community by volunteering to participate in an onsite project before GDC 2018.

Here’s how it works: Everyone who signs up for the Indie Giving package will meet ahead of GDC 2018 on Sunday, March 18th to pitch in together on a humanitarian service project in the Bay Area.

Those who participate after purchasing an Indie Giving Package get transportation and lunch on the Sunday volunteering day, and other perks to come. In addition, any remaining funds left after Indie Giving is completed will be donated to charity.

Indie Giving package buyers will also get a pass to attend the Independent Games Summit on March 19th and 20th at GDC 2018 – making this charitable program the only way you can get this sold-out pass at this point.

To get yours, head over to the Indie Giving website now — supplies are limited!

For more information on GDC 2018, visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

Gary Whitta is a man of many talents.

From a career in publishing and games journalism, notably as the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine, Whitta transitioned to the creative side of entertainment, penning a number of high profile films, comics, books, and games.

Whitta’s impressive (and numerous) credits include standouts like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Telltale’s video game adaptation of The Walking Dead, and the comic series Oliver, which casts Dickens’ eponymous protagonist as a post-apocalyptic superhero.

Writers who work in games may be curious to know that while he’s written for a tremendous number of mediums and genres, Whitta admits a preference for the collaborative nature of writing for TV — and for games.

“I think film will always be my first language, so to speak,” Whitta says. “It’s the form I’m most experienced and comfortable with it. But in branching out into writing books and television and games and comics my eyes have really been opened to the different possibilities offered by other forms. Of them all I think I prefer television and interactive as the story breaking process is team-based and a lot of fun. Batting around ideas with a bunch of smart writers is some of the most fun you can have as a writer in this business, and you learn a lot.”

“Create characters we can care about”

Regardless of medium, Whitta’s creative process is much the same. “Know what you’re trying to communicate thematically,” he says, “create characters we can care about, be mindful of structure, don’t be predictable, try to surprise as much as possible.”

“The only real power you have is the power to persuade others that the idea you’re championing is the right one.”

But with each new format came a new set of rules and structures, new contingencies and demands. Whitta says that expanding into different mediums taught him valuable lessons that could applied across all of them.

“Writing for half-hour television (with Star Wars Rebels) was a crash course in concision and efficiency in storytelling, which are worthwhile skills in any storytelling medium,” he adds. 

“Having 120-ish pages to tell a complete story feels like such a luxury when suddenly asked to do the same thing in just 20-25 pages. It really forces you to do discipline yourself, to cut absolutely everything that isn’t necessary, so do and say more with less, to enter a scene as late as possible and to exit it as early as possible. And you really have to hit your mark because commercial television is locked down to the second in terms of runtime, as opposed to almost every other medium where length is more flexible.”

After the rigid structure of episodic TV, writing a book was a much more freeform (and relaxed) experience.

“I really enjoyed writing my novel, as a screenwriter it’s a breath of fresh air to write something that is actually going to be the finished product as opposed to just the theoretical blueprint for a finished product, which is all a screenplay ever really is,” Whitta says. “The finished film, if you’re lucky enough to get it made, may bear some resemblance to your script and to what you intended to convey when writing it, or it may not. I’ve had both experiences, and as a writer you’re largely powerless to effect that outcome.”

But for Whitta, the most promising field moving forward is games: a medium still in its infancy but with vast untapped potential. He recommends it for writers “looking to tell non-conventional stories and experiment with different narrative techniques. It’s also potentially the best opportunity to really create engagement by continuing to melt away the wall between storyteller and audience. In a good interactive story the audience feels like the story is happening to and around them, rather than simply watching the story happen to someone else. I have no doubt that it’s the medium where the most potentially interesting stories will be told over the coming generation.”

It’s not surprising, then, that a medium with so much room for growth and at such a foundational level of development would be rife with difficulties and challenges. Introducing player agency makes crafting realistic, consistent characters much harder than it is in mediums where the author has more control.

Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead (2012)

“If you play any standard choiced-based branching game it’s usually possible to get really silly and create wild character ‘mood swings’ that go way outside the norms of logical and consistent character behavior,” says Whitta. 

“You can be a paragon of virtue one minute and a total asshole the next. I think that’s something that we’ll evolve beyond as we come to better understand how to meld player agency with curated storytelling — the player will still be able to inform character choices and the outcome of both scenes and the overall story, but I think we will see more work being done behind the scenes with the narrative engine to adapt to cumulative player choices and, for example, generate bespoke third-act consequences that are an accurate reflection of the kind of character the player has been shaping through their choices.”

And writing for games is technically much different than any other sort of writing. Instead of a single, linear script or narrative, a game might demand a massive network of possible outcomes, which means exponentially more text.

“Branching experiences are just a nightmare to write,” Whitta admits. “They can be a lot of fun as they allow writers to execute multiple versions of scenes and see them all potentially play out based on player choice, but the sheer volume of material needed to flesh out all the possible variations of scenes and stories, and ensuring that each combination is as narratively and logically legitimate as any other is tremendously mind-bending work.”

“On the first season of The Walking Dead I wrote the first draft of my episode in a fairly standard screenplay form, as the familiarity of that form allowed me to write the way I was most comfortable with,” he continues, but even a simplified approach left him with a bulging 500-page document, roughly the size of four feature-length screen plays.

“And then I had to rewrite the entire thing into Telltale’s proprietary story tool which looks like an incredibly complex flowchart and is very off-putting at first, but as you get used to it you start to realize it’s actually the best way to visualize and track a multi-dimensional story.”

“Recognize when a particular idea of yours is not getting traction and…carefully consider what hills you are willing to die on — because as a writer for hire on a project your death is the most likely outcome if you pick the wrong battle.”

Unlike film or television, where the basic format of a script has long been standardized, writing for games means to some extent making it up as you go and hoping the pieces all fit together in the final product. 

“it’s the medium that places the most demands on the writer since the story has to work within a much more complex and demanding overall framework, story is not always the sole driver of the experience as it is in other media,” Whitta explains. “The actual form of the writing can be radically different depending on the storytelling approach the game is taking. In the ‘traditional’ approach of telling a story through linear, non-interactive cinematics parceled out between gameplay, that’s not so far removed from writing film and television, but with the caveat that you’re writing a story designed to be consumed in short chunks spread out over many hours, so understanding how a story like that should be paced is important.”

It’s much more complex, however, when trying to tell a story that’s influenced in large part by player decisions. And while on the surface the idea of player agency in game worlds seems very appealing, Whitta is cautious about the idea of giving players primary control over storytelling.

Giving the client the kitchen they want

“Whether that’s actually a goal worth striving for is still an ongoing discussion; we have to think very carefully about how much authorship of a story it’s desirable to cede to the player,” he warns. “Even in a theoretical interactive story where the player could branch the narrative in very granular ways and develop potentially limitless combinations of stories there needs to be a lot of curation and guidance on the part of the actual storyteller.”

And telling stories in worlds as culturally important and established as Star Wars or The Walking Dead comes with its own set of obstacles and frustrations.

“I’ve been very lucky in that the teams at Telltale Games and Lucasfilm are both extremely collaborative and inclusive in their creative processes. At the same time you’re always very aware of the fact that this is someone else’s sandbox, and you’re just privileged to have been invited to come play in it.”

Whitta compares the process to being a contractor renovating someone’s home; he can pitch his vision, but the final decision is out of his hands.

“At the end of the day it’s their kitchen, they’re paying for it, and so it’s my job to find the line between fighting for the ideas that I think would be best and giving the client the kitchen they want,” he concludes. 

“The only real power you have is the power to persuade others that the idea you’re championing is the right one. Or, just as often, to recognize when a particular idea of yours is not getting traction and to carefully consider what hills you are willing to die on — because as a writer for hire on a project, your death is the most likely outcome if you pick the wrong battle.”

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s highlights include a look at evocative smartphone title Florence, the anniversary of Valve’s Orange Box, and a Monster Hunter buddy team-up service.

BTW, a small change in my picks for this week. In general, I haven’t really been reprinting preview or review pieces. But I realized that many of you would probably like to know about new games that are interesting! So I will be occasionally printing longer-form writing in those genres – this time, a review of Florence & a preview of Sea Of Thieves.

Until next time,
– Simon, curator.]

——————

The Fire Fades: Dealing with the scourge of burnout in game dev (Joel Couture / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Burnout. It’s an imprecise term for a very specific, endemic problem in game development, one often (but not always) caused by the industry’s proclivity for crunch.”

Being Derek Yu: A Chat With The Creator of ‘Spelunky’, ‘UFO 50’ (Alan Bradley / Rolling Stone – ARTICLE)
“But when Derek Yu was making his first, tentative steps into game design, those figures were largely attached to huge companies, as often businessmen as creators, and the independent scene flourishing today existed only as some nascent chatter on some very niche websites.”

The Rise of the Systemic Game (Game Maker’s Toolkit / YouTube – VIDEO)
“From Breath of the Wild to Watch Dogs 2, we’re seeing a boom in so-called “systemic games”. What does that mean, how do they work, and what makes them tick?”

Alt.Ctrl.GDC Showcase for GDC 2018 (Joel Couture / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“[SIMON’S NOTE: Am so looking forward to playing all these alternative controller games on the show floor at GDC – I also get to judge them for the special alt.ctrl.GDC award we give out during the IGF Awards! But the interviews are worth checking out even if you can’t try the games in person.]”

Sea of Thieves is huge, fun, and just what the Xbox One needs (Tom Warren / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“I’ve spent hours pretending to be a pirate, eating bananas in a peculiar fashion, smiling until I cried, and getting drunk to the point of dizziness — all with the help of an Xbox controller. British video game developer Rare, creator of classics like Battletoads, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie, has moved in a new direction with the upcoming pirate game Sea of Thieves.”

How Limbo & Inside Use Tone to Create Space (Dan Root / YouTube – VIDEO)
“It’s not often a game eradicates colours to focus on another aspect of design. Let’s look at how Playdead’s Limbo & Inside do this.”

Keep playing, keep paying: Ubisoft seeks games with “longterm engagement” (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“An accompanying quarterly report Powerpoint presentation helps explain just why these long-lasting “live” games have become the company’s primary concern. While “traditional” games tend to maintain only 13 percent of their revenue into their second year, “live” games bring in 52 percent of that first-year level into year two, according to Ubisoft’s data. [SIMON’S NOTE: Ubisoft is being very explicit about what is _the_ trend for large console game companies right now.]”

Sex, Pong, And Pioneers: What Atari Was Really Like, According To Women Who Were There (Cecilia D’Anastasio / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Back in 1973, Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” was blaring from the PA in a California warehouse as two dozen women in flared jeans assembled Pong circuit boards. The smell of corned beef and marijuana wafted down the manufacturing line. Orders for Atari’s landmark table tennis video game were still pouring in on the crisp October day when Elaine Shirley first giddily entered the warehouse to join the all-woman crew of Pong cabinet-stuffers.”

84: THE SECRET MEMBERS-ONLY BAR FREQUENTED BY FAMOUS ARTISTS, MUSICIANS, and NINTENDO EMPLOYEES (Kanae Nakamine / Tofugu – ARTICLE)
“Well, this is awkward. Recently, Koichi and I went to the bar “84” (pronounced hashi), a bar known in some circles as “the Mecca of Nintendo fans.” People search for years trying to find this place, almost always with no success, but we were lucky. And, when we thought about our Nintendo mega-fan co-worker Michael, we felt even more like we didn’t deserve going here. Oh well!”

The Ambitious Music of Tim Follin | Punching Weight (Stop Skeletons From Fighting / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Today on Punching Weight we wanted to celebrate a prolific, yet obscure video game composer: Tim Follin. He’s composed some of our favorite retro video game music, from Silver Surfer to Rock ‘n Roll Racing, and always managed so we decided to take a closer look at his career. [SIMON’S NOTE: OMG, I’m a gigantic Tim Follin fan and even ran a Tim Follin fanpage in the early ’00s!]”

Florence’s Unique Gameplay Captures the Daily Trials of Being in a Relationship(Caty McCarthy / USGamer – ARTICLE)
“Florence, the new game by the studio Mountains from Ken Wong (the lead designer behind Monument Valley), shows this side of love too, and then some. Florence is an interactive comic on iOS about love, life, and everything in-between. As a game, its interactions are minimal, from dragging a toothbrush back and forth to matching numbers at the main character’s mundane accounting job.”

Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI(Ed Beach / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2017 GDC session, Firaxis Games’ Ed Beach looks in depth at several of the key subsystems in a Civilization title and review what design changes were adopted (or abandoned) for each one.”

Road to GDC: The Power of Helplessness in Video Games (Florent Maurin / Rolling Stone – ARTICLE)
“Why do we play video games? This is a complicated question, to which there’s more than one answer. You may be attracted to the idea of slowly getting to master an intricate system of rules. You may crave for the almost intoxicating feeling you get when roaming through an open world.”

Behind The Sunless Scenes (Tom Phillips / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Eurogamer was alerted to the upcoming layoffs and complaints of poor management at the studio several weeks ago, and over the past month I have spoken with around a dozen Failbetter staff, past and present, both before and after the company made its public announcement. These claims have found voice in Failbetter’s former boss Alexis Kennedy…”

New Year’s Discussion with Sakurai, Ueda, and Kamiya (Famitsu / Sourcegaming – ARTICLE)
“For their first issue of 2018, the Year of the Dog, Famitsu held two conversations with two trios of developers who were born in other Years of the Dog, 1970 and 1982. Here’s a full translation of Team 1970’s talk, with Fumito Ueda, Masahiro Sakurai, and Hideki Kamiya. Read on to hear them discuss their earliest experiences with video games, their ambitions for 2018, and how long they plan to keep making games.”

My Job Doesn’t Exist Without the Support of Fans. How Much Do I Owe Them?(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“These topics are always floating around my head, but became more pronounced after a recent incident on Twitch. On February 5, 2018, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds personality Dr DisRespect returned to streaming, and nearly 400,000 people tuned in to watch him mow down people—a new record.”

Tone Control Ep. 20: Davey Wreden (Steve Gaynor / Idle Thumbs – PODCAST)
“A thirteen-foot-tall octopus named Edward Scissorhands rampages into your life and destroys everything you love. What do you do? If you’re me, you interview him! This hellish creature, also known as Davey Wreden, is the creator of two of the most mind-bending indie story games in recent history, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide.”

Adventure-Game Rock Stars Live in Conference (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian – ARTICLE)
“On August 24, 1990, CompuServe hosted an online discussion on adventure-game design which included Ron Gilbert, Noah Falstein, Bob Bates, Steve Meretzky, Mike Berlyn, Dave Lebling, Roberta Williams, Al Lowe, Corey and Lori Ann Cole, and Guruka Singh Khalsa. This is, needless to say, an incredible gathering of adventuring star power.”

The Orange Box… 10 Years Later (Raycevick / YouTube – VIDEO)
“[SIMON’S NOTE: another excellent longform Raycevick video, this time on Valve’s amazing game compilation, from back when they released lots of games themselves…]”

Being adopted by a Monster Hunter veteran is brilliant (Robert Purchese / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“I could be adopted. Not full-on adopted but Monster Hunter adopted. You see there’s a service out there for timid Monster Hunters like me, who want to break into the series with the help of a friendly hand. A service offering personal mentors to coach people through the game.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

Crispy’s Inc. was founded by a team of aspiring creators with zero previous game development experience. So how did the inexperienced team manage to create Tokyo Jungle? 

In this 2013 GDC session, Yohei Kataoka goes over how a game development team with little experience was able to create the successful game Tokyo Jungle and explores the potential of the Japanese game development scene.

Kataoka also discusses how an inexperienced company like Crispy’s Inc. ended up releasing a first-party title for the PlayStation 3 as their debut game. 

Developers interested in how Tokyo Jungle came to be may appreciate that they can now watch the talk completely free via the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

In a blog posted earlier this week, EVE Online developers announced that players who create automated bots will be banned for three days and removed from the game permanently if they are repeat offenders. 

While CCP isn’t taking legal action against players who create automated bots it could be a possibility in the future, as a court recently ruled in favor of Twitch cracking down on illegal bot makers. 

After players expressed frustration over the increased number of botters in EVE Online, CCP was prompted to implement stricter punishments.

“A little over 1800 accounts were banned for botting/automation in January,” the blog states. “About one third of the affected accounts received permanent bans as repeat offenders, while the rest was temporarily banned on first offense.”

Starting March 1st, players caught on a first botting offense will be temporarily banned from EVE Online for three days as opposed to the current thirty days. A second offense will result in a permanent ban from the game.  

Lead community developer Sveinn Kjarval went into more detail about the update in the comments of the blog post. “We used to have more strikes in the past but they were reduced down to two which is plenty enough,” he writes. “Our goal isn’t to punish but to end the behavior that breaks the rules for the sake of the game.”